Inside Podango

Important Announcement

We at Podango believe that you, our customers, are our most valuable asset. Given this belief, we have always done our best to be honest and forthright in our dealings with you. The current uncertainties of the financial market has affected many of us in this nation. As of this morning, Podango is no longer immune to it’s effects. Our ability to continue operations past the end of this year (2008) is in question. We do not want any of you, or any of your shows to be negatively affected by this uncertainty and so we are encouraging you to begin taking all necessary steps to secure your data or begin moving to another hosting provider.  On Monday we will have a more definitive direction. As of today, the last day to move or secure your data is December 31st. RSS feeds will need to be redirected by this date as well. It is our hope that the events of the next few days will allow us to continue providing you a service based upon a subscription fee. Again, we will know more on Monday and you will be notified of any changes to the above plan as soon as we are made aware of them. We do apologize for the short notice during a time when many of you are very busy, and didn’t plan on spending this much time on your shows.

We will have a link in the My Podango section of the Podcasters login page by Monday which will allow you to redirect your RSS feed off of the Podango feed to a new feed. Instructions will accompany that tool. Also on Monday we will provide you with alternatives for show hosting.

Inactive accounts, those without recent uploads or downloads, may be already been deleted from the system. If you need to contact us, please use info@podango.com.

Again I personally apologize for this notice of caution. We truly appreciate your business.

Doug

Douglas G. Smith
President - Podango

Posted in News | No Comments »

Player API Outage Resolved This Morning

Hi, All.

We resolved an issue this morning where the player itself would load on our site and other sites, but wouldn’t load the episode metadata including the image, and when play was clicked, nothing would happen other than a spinner graphic would spin indicating there was something going on in the background.

The root of the problem was caused by some server maintanance. We moved the site codebase from one source control repository to another to make a change to the RSS publisher and the logging directory for the APIs didn’t get created. (The Fix to the RSS Publisher, incidentally took the ‘Powered by Podango’ text out of the <itunes:subtitle> field and replaced it with your show description.)

The real bummer is that although we tested site functionality as we were deploying code to each server, we didn’t check the flash player again after all the servers were deployed. We sincerely regret having this problem. We’re very sorry for the issues it may have caused you, your shows and your audiences. We know many of you rely on the remotable player to expose your shows into places like Myspace, your own sites and encouraging your listeners/viewers to post it in other places as well.

We’re also very grateful for your patience.

Sincerely,

Your Podango Geeks

Posted in Outage/Downtime, System Update | No Comments »

Podango.com site was unavailable this morning

Hi, All.

I got an email this morning from one of our faithful podcasters letting me know that the podango.com site was unavailable. If you’re going to have an outage, that’s not exactly how you want to find out it happened especially when you’ve invested time and effort in setting up sophisticated, redundant monitoring systems. Those layers didn’t send us the alerts that would have helped us solve the problem, but John David Boreing of the Life: Frugal and Simple podcast was on the ball. Thanks, John.

Anyway, the problem was that all the application servers that present the front-end of the site became unresponsive behind the load balancers. Normally a few of those could go out and end users wouldn’t be affected at all. Under normal circumstances, if one or more app servers went out, we’d get notifications and be able to fix the issue before anyone ever noticed besides our engineering team.

Needless to say, we’ll be digging into our monitoring systems and looking at them with a fine-toothed comb to make sure we’re getting as reliable service as we need from them.

This issue didn’t affect downloads, anyone who subscribed via iTunes, Adobe Media Player, or RSS would have not had any issues getting your media files.

Thanks for your patience.

Your Podango Geeks

Posted in Outage/Downtime | No Comments »

Short Download Outage This Morning

This morning Podango experienced a short outage having to do with our download servers. This outage would have affected all downloads from Podango’s servers, including from iTunes and in our Flash player.

The outage has been resolved and all media files should be available as normal.

Posted in Outage/Downtime | No Comments »

Site maintenance 9/27/08

On Saturday the 27th of September we will be bringing the website down for some maintenance.  This should last less then 30 min and should not effect the ability to download media.  We will update insidepodango.com when the maintenance is complete.

Thank you,

The Podango Geeks.

Posted in Outage/Downtime | No Comments »

Hosting Provider Issues Resolved

Hi, All.

As many of you were aware, we had some issues with downloads, especially in iTunes, getting truncated. You also likely know that it was due to an issue with our hosting provider’s storage network. We’ve received word from them that they’ve resolved the issue and taken steps to make sure the issue won’t crop up again.

In addition to the word from them, we’d like to announce that we have a brought a failover service online that will help us avoid this specific problem in the future. We can now, at the flip of a switch move our download streams in a completely transparent manner from one backend to another if there is ever a disruption like occurred before.

Yup, we like you that much to bring up a redundant delivery system.

Please let us know immediately if you hear of any other disruptions in the system, as we want to get them resolved if they exist.

Thanks as always,

Your Podango Geeks.

Posted in News, System Update, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Removal of old files

Hi, All.

Just a quick note to get the word out that we’re getting ready to clean out the basement, followed by the garage. In doing so, there will be an almost non-existent chance that you and your files will be affected. We wanted to get the word out, though so you all can know what is going on behind the curtain.

What we’re doing is removing the archives of all the media files our users have uploaded but then subsequently deleted, or for shows that have been deleted out of the system. This won’t affect any stations, shows or episodes in use, even ones that appear abandoned, although we’ll be contacting show owners individually about either reviving or removing those in the future.

So the process will look like this:

1. We archive all of the unused media files for 3 weeks
2. In that three weeks if you find your files were affected (very, very, very unlikely), give us a shout and we’ll restore from backup
3. If we don’t hear from show producers, listeners or viewers we’ll remove them permanently from the live system.

Like always, if you have questions, or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Thanks,

Your Podango Geeks

Posted in News | No Comments »

PSBL uploader issue resolved

Hi, All.

Good news: the PSBL uploader issue is finally resolved! We’re very sorry for the difficulties and the delays. We know it was painful for many of you, and we appreciate your patience.

If you’re interested in the reason, Amazon Web Services fixed a bug in their system that the code library we used (provided by Amazon) triggered. Once they fixed the bug, it broke our code and it was so buried that it took a long time to fix.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

The Podango Geeks.

Posted in Uploading Media, psbl | No Comments »

PSBL uploader issue

Hi, folks.

Sorry for the confusion in our last communication, and the lateness in getting this out. We’ve had several support requests come through the last couple of days alterting us to the issues with uploading into the Show Builder Lite system.

The errors say: “GigavoxException: Failure to enqueue ingest message to …”

The downtime reported previously was to work on this issue. That was resolved in the hour and only prohibited users from accessing the website at http://cms.podango.net.

The uploading issues are still persisting, and we’re doing our best to solve the problem ASAP. We know a lot of you are trying to get your shows published.

Thanks for your patience as we solve this problem. As soon as it is fixed, we’ll post a message here, as well as shoot an email to anyone who sent us a support request letting you all know that it is up again.

Thanks,

Your Podango Geeks.

Posted in Outage/Downtime, Uploading Media, psbl | No Comments »

PSBL Downtime for 8/19/2008

We are having some problems with PSBL right now and it will require us to take it off line for about an hour later this evening.  Thank you for your patience and this post will be updated with further information later.

Posted in Outage/Downtime, psbl | No Comments »

Podango Show Builder Issues.

Some users have reported that thier media is not getting added to their episodes.  We are looking into this and will update here with findings.

UPDATE 6/26

The issue has been resolved and media that was not working will be shortly.

Thank you.

Posted in psbl | No Comments »

Web server issues 04-21-2008.

Earlier today it was reported that our site was down. After investigating we saw there was an error on a few of our servers connecting to our database. This issue has been resolved on our end and we are reporting our findings to our service provider. This problem is fixed now and shouldn’t happen in the future.

Thank you,

The Podango Geeks

Posted in Outage/Downtime | No Comments »

Issue Fixed: Video Podcasts not Playing after Being Uploaded

We’ve fixed a bug that only affected large video files.  It turns out that files over a certain size were being processed into .flv files (for the flash player) but then were timing out during their transfer to storage for download.

Posted in Changelog | No Comments »

Podango Show Builder Lite Issues. — Resolved

Hey all,

The hosting company we are with for Podango Show Builder Lite is current having some connectivity issues. It should be fixed soon and the log in problems should be resolved. Thank you for your patience and place look here for any updates.

UPDATE - 2008.04.07 9:45PM

Just to let you know we are still in contact with our provider and have a high priority ticket open. We are communicating with them and hope to have an ETA soon.

UPDATE - 2008.04.08 12:15AM

Still waiting for the service provider.

UPDATE - 2008.04.08 3:05AM

This issue has now been resolved.  Thank you.

Posted in Outage/Downtime, System Update, psbl | No Comments »

Statistics Pages Update

Hi, All.

We just wanted to post a quick note about the pending upgrade on our stats collection and display engines. We’re updating the backend databases so we can give even better stats, and as a result the stats pages won’t be updated regularly until further changes are complete and the servers are updated. All of your traffic is still being logged, and we’ll get the stats pages displaying stats soon.

Sorry for the delay.

Your Podango Geeks.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

2008-03-17: Hosting Maintenance and Downtime.

Monday morning at 8:30 EST Podango will be unavailable for 20 min so our hosting company can perform some hardware maintenance.

Thank you,

The Podango Geeks.

Posted in Outage/Downtime | No Comments »

New Processing and Download systems coming soon to a Podango near you

Hi, All.

Prepare the megaphone and keep those starbursts handy! Your faithful team of Podango Geeks is pleased to announce that we’re getting ready to deploy our new-and-improved processing system along with our new shiny-sexy-fast download system. We’re in the final stages of testing the new systems, and will keep you all posted as we roll it live.

The one-two punch of these systems will expand the our media download capacity greatly, and will improve our integration with WordPress and PodPress. We know that doesn’t sound sexy, but check back when we roll it live for more details & buzzwords.

Sincerely,

Your favorite geeks @ Podango.

Posted in News | No Comments »

2008-02-25: Emergency database maintenance.

We need to do some quick database maintenance that should take less then 10 min and the only service that should be effected is downloads. A few downloads might time out but if the user is using iTunes it will check again and re-download it.

Thank you,

The Podango Geeks

Posted in Outage/Downtime | No Comments »

Changelog for Feb 20, 2008

- Statistics no longer timeout for podcasts with large numbers of subscribers.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Uploading issues for some customers

Hi, All.

We’ve had reports from a few people saying they were/are having issues uploading media files to in the episode creation process.

If you are one of the (un)lucky people having this experience, we’d love to hear from you.

Please shoot us an email to our support at podango email address, we’d love to quash this bug soon, and the more detail we can get from you all, the better.

Thanks,

The Podango Geeks.

Posted in Uploading Media | No Comments »